Staff Zine Fall 2022

Letter from the editor

Dear Illumination Reader,

I am pleased to present to you Illumination Journal’s Fall 2022 Staff Zine, encompassing works across a variety of artistic and linguistic mediums. This year, we chose to focus our theme on the art palette. I can think of no better fit to describe the assortment of colorful, wonderful folks we currently have on our staff. It has been a pleasure working with all of them on this--I hope you find as much joy in reading and viewing these works as I have had interacting with their creators and authors. Happy

Autumn Payette

Editor-in-Chief

Nature’s Palette • Photography

Emily Laskowski

Poetry editor

Discovering Colors

Iridiana’s world had no color. Her clothes were shades of white, gray, and black. Her eyes were gray, her skin a pale white. She lived in a town with gray buildings and gray roads. Grass didn’t exist, and the sky was a perpetual pale gray. Even the food was dull colors. Color did not exist here.

She knew what color was, of course. They had to learn about the spectrum of light in her science class. Only they learned about it through their black and white textbooks. It wasn’t difficult, living without color. It was all they knew, so they became used to it.

But Iridiana was growing tired of living like that. She loved drawing with her black and white and gray shades of pencils and charcoal. Imagine the possibilities with all the rest of the colors? Imagine going out and being able to see a rainbow of colors through flowers and cars and clothes. She knew that color existed out there somewhere. She just had to find it.

She started trying to find something other than the usual black, white, and gray. Imme-

diately she found herself having difficulties. She searched everywhere: through her room, through the school, through the courtyard. She just couldn’t find anything.

Dejected, she sat down on the bench and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” one of her friends asked, sitting down next to her.

“I’m trying to find color somewhere,” Iridiana said. “But I can’t find anything.”

“I’ll help.” Her friend reached into her bag and pulled out a piece of paper. “Stick out your hand.”

Iridiana did as she was told. “Why?”

Suddenly, her friend drew the paper across her hand, slicing into the skin. Iridiana gave a yelp and jumped back, clutching her arm to her chest. “Ouch! What was that for?”

Her friend laughed. “Look at your hand.”

To Iridiana’s amazement, something was leaking out from where she’d been cut. Something bold and harsh. “What is that?” she whispered in amazement.

“That would be your blood,” her friend said. “Your body is full of it. It helps to keep you alive. And it is colorful.”

“You’re a genius!” exclaimed Iridiana. “Do you think you could help me find the other colors?”

“Sure,” her friend said. The two went searching, until eventually they ran into another color, something peculiar. In the back of a building, tucked away from view, a color stained a metal staircase.

“Which one do you think that is?” Iridiana asked.

“I don’t know,” said her friend, crouching closer to get a better look. “It looks similar to the color your blood was.”

Iridiana picked up a small metal wire laying on the ground that was stained as well and put it in her bag. “Let’s keep looking.”

They soon found another color. It came from a flower growing out of the cracks of the sidewalk. It was a bright color, one that sprouted into existence. “What color do you think this is?” asked Iridiana.

“I don’t know,” replied her friend. “But it reminds me of the color white. Only duller, if that makes sense.”

“I’ve never seen such a thing,” exclaimed Iridiana. “Where do you think this came from?”

“Flowers grow from seeds,” said her friend. “So there has to be plants somewhere close to here where the seeds came from.”

The two looked over and found a large building. “Maybe it came from there,” Iridiana said. “I wonder what’s in that building.” The two tried opening the back door, but found it locked. Suddenly, her friend said, “Do you still have that metal wire?”

Iridiana pulled it from her bag and her friend immediately went to work on the lock. Suddenly, the door sprung open.

Iridiana’s eyes widened as a plethora of colors shot out at her from inside the building. Dozens of flowers and plants sprouted all over inside. The two gasped as they wandered in, taking in the overwhelming diversity of shades and hues.

“We have to share this with everyone,” Iridiana exclaimed.

Her friend nodded. “There is no way we can keep this a secret.”

“I am afraid I cannot let you do that,” came a voice from behind them. Startled, the two spun around to find none other than the town leader approaching. “All this color cannot get out. It would overwhelm the people. We cannot have that.” The leader swung the door shut–their only escape.

“You can’t hide this color from everyone,” said the friend. “We won’t let you do that.”

“And how do you think you are going to stop me?” asked the leader.

Suddenly, Iridiana had an idea. Grabbing a fistful of petals, she shoved the window open and tossed them outside. Catching on a breeze, the petals broke off into hundreds of tiny pieces, torn apart, blowing away. Catching on, her friend did the same as the leader screamed at them to stop.

“We will stop you by doing that,” proclaimed Iridiana. “Those petals will spread and people will see them. More flowers will grow, and people will finally see what color truly is.”

The leader took a few stumbling steps back. Then, with a terrified breath, he fled the building, running off into the distance, never to be seen again.

Iridiana and her friend immediately set off throughout the town, leaving the plants at people’s doorsteps. They tossed petals into the town square and stained buildings with the colors from the petals. And when the townspeople walked outside the next day, they were astounded at the new sights that were painted across their town. Seeing Iridiana and her friend still spreading the flowers throughout the town, one man asked, “Where did you get all of this?”

The two friends showed the townspeople to the building with all the flowers. Soon, everyone in town was distributing the plants, placing them on windowsills, even making paints to color things with. Together, they spread the seeds of color, hoping more would grow.

Self portrait of a burnout playing with matches • Acrylic Paint

Marley Mendez

Layout Editor

Needle threader

Sitting on cheap nylon, curly carpet, honey dripping sun bears down through bay windows and warms every inch of my young skin. I am almost blinded by this beautifully warm suffocation as this golden Saturday morning light wraps itself around every particle of dust in the air and cell on my body.

I’m sitting cross legged, with my chin on hands with elbows on knees and my mother has strewn about a palette of various threads along the floor. She is teaching me to sew.

It is my duty as a girl. To sew, to heal, to fix the holes belonging to someone else’s clothes Holes I did not tear myself.

What does it mean to be a girl? Feminine? A woman? The cheap plastic tray is scarlet and houses baby blues, fuchsia, jungle green and lavender threads lying next to needles of various sizes. But I was always intrigued by the thinly plated needle threader with the profile view of a woman. She seemed so poised, confined, lonely in that threader.

My mother’s thin, spotted, steady hands made strong jabs with each stitch and I waited in hesitation that it would not be my turn soon.

I watched her stitch these colors that never perfectly matched the clothes that required mending. I watched sloppy and imperfect solutions to holes that I didn’t believe needed fixing. If anything, it only brought more attention to them with slight searching. I still feared and felt pity for the woman in the threader.

To be a woman, meant sharp jabs my mother’s fingers and hands said. It meant teaching daughters how to be a needle threader, not even the woman in the threader.

The sunlight eventually faded, and the kit was eventually packed away, never to be touched by my own hands again. I suppose these aren’t women’s hands.

Jane McCauley

Poetry Editor

Poetry Editor

Text-to-Speech Childhood

For most people, myself included, not being able to read is not a conscious memory. As a little kid, letters were just small, abstract lines that were not interesting enough to draw my attention away from the pictures on the page. Even if I was curious about what the strange shapes meant, adults supplemented the written words with voices so well that they were easy to ignore. Instead, I gathered information by asking too many questions and listening in on conversations, leaving the street signs and grocery labels to the grown-ups. I only became aware that I was illiterate when I discovered that I could read in one language, but not another.

As a little kid, my family spoke a mix of English and Spanish around the house. I was fluent in both but did not consciously understand that the two languages were separate. This thought process was a non-issue until I started kindergarten. Lacking a clear definition between the two languages, I thought that pronunciation and reading rules were universal. When the time came for me to learn to read, I followed the traditional trajectory for English: learn letters and equate them to the sounds my tongue makes. And this went well. I began to look forward to reading in class each day. I liked carefully printing words on lined paper, and I loved learning how to pronounce tricky words. The trouble started when my mother decided I should begin reading at home, as well.

My mom decided we would start with 365 Cuentos y Rimas para Niñas— a battered

book of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. I was excited. I was sure I would be able to read the words, looking at the pages I could identify all the letters, and I knew what sounds they made. But it was not this easy. To start, although most letters sound the same in English as they do in Spanish, there are key differences that made reading in Spanish almost impossible for me. This is best explained by the spelling and pronunciation of the English word “Jello,” which in Spanish would be pronounced “he-yo” and “quarantine,” which would be pronounced “car-aunt-een-eh.” Neither one of these examples are intelligible, but that was how I read aloud. Secondly, the formal instruction I received when learning English phonetics was entirely missing, and without any knowledge otherwise, I applied my shiny new rules to every written word I came across, language barriers be damned. Thirdly, the average length of a word in Spanish is much longer than the average length of English words, which tend to be monosyllabic, especially in books for beginners.

When I first tried to read at home, it was a train wreck. The pages felt like optical illusions. The words only made sense up close, letter by letter. When I strung the letters together I was completely lost. I had never seen these long, vowel-filled words, and when I said them out loud they made absolutely no sense. I was not the only one who was lost. My reading sounded so much like gibberish that my mom had to watch the page as I read, to see what I was trying to sound out. My mother

was always able to turn the letters into words I recognized, but the moment I tried again, the words would melt back into meaningless letter soup, and I would be left staring at the page in frustration, listening to my mother’s exasperated sighs over my shoulders.

As time went on, I never got any better at reading in Spanish. I tripped over words just as much as I did that first night, and I started to dread going to bed because I knew what was coming. Every night, we sat on the edge of the bed, and I followed her finger across the page with my tired eyes. But it never made any sense. Every day, I went to school, where we rehearsed the Latin alphabet’s American articulation, and then I would go home with those letter sounds cemented into my brain, directly opposing what my mother was trying to show me.

Much like I started avoiding going to bed, I started avoiding using Spanish. I knew the round, fast sounds were ones I could not read, and I was afraid that at any given time it would be demanded of me to read them and fail. I started responding to Spanish in English. I would frantically extricate myself from any Spanish-language conversation and run to hide in a corner, pretending to be absorbed in playing make-believe. Five-year-olds are not naturally profound conversationalists, but this further widened the communication gap between my family and me. I interacted nonverbally, severely limiting what I could share, and my anti-Spanish policy made it impossible for them to respond in any kind without me squirming away before they could pull out a book.

My mother and I continued our frustrating evenings together, perched on the edge of the bed, me in frilly pink pajamas, and her with her head in her hands. My tongue dragged over each syllable, and her verbal corrections became sharper. We switched to repetition exercises, where she would read sentences to me, and I would read it back, but it only resulted in me memorizing the lines rather than learning the noises the letters made. I was able to recite several picture books in their entirety, but not read a single one. Around Christmastime, my mother developed a new strategy. We started

from scratch. She lined up all the letters and asked me to pronounce them. Then, she drew a line down the paper and divided it in half. She explained that the words I used at school and with dad’s family had different rules than the ones we were practicing. She tried to establish a clear language barrier, communicating in either Spanish or English, trying to help me learn to identify the difference. Initially, we struggled with the rigidity of the switch, and I lost some of the fluidity that came from the permeable language barrier, but the two became concrete and separate. It was easy for me to tell them apart. Then we went through the alphabet, but this time she made sure I had proper Spanish inflection on each letter.

Over time, I learned the paper patterns as well as the verbal ones. We went from reading and rereading a fairytale book to reading an atlas about oceans and then a series of overly colorful thrillers of questionable appropriateness for a nine year old. As the books got thicker and less colorful, the rules became instinctual. I found I could read and write letters to and from family members thousands of miles away, the same comfortable way I read and wrote in English. I learned what I could apply to both languages, like my tone of voice, and what I had to switch, like sentence structure and word choice. I went back to relentlessly chattering at my Spanish-speaking relatives. I made up for the lost time by carrying on a stream-of-consciousness dialogue with my cousins, forcing the gap between us to close. But my Spanish was never the same, it remains very distinct from my English.

Coming out the other side. I felt intense relief knowing I could communicate with ease in Spanish. Even now, I feel a rush of satisfaction when I can skim a book with no apparent struggle. Despite my confidence in my fluency, I am still jolted back to those long, painful evenings at my mom’s side when I mispronounce a word. In my mind, I am once again five years old, trying to twist the meaning out of misshapen words.

Zoe Guderyon

Marketing/Graphics

The Distance Between

Hands touch, brushes light Too much pressure may wipe away All that has been building between us A raindrop trickles down your skin Not enough time Will I seize it?

Or will it trail off of you and sink into the ground Like the traces of all this noise between us Silent to those who look upon us But a vibrant symphony of color within The particles that separate us

Hesitation lingers between the spaces of our souls Why won’t you close this distance. Did I apply too much pressure? Did I wipe you away?

I came to tell you That I love you But you looked aside Not enough time I couldn’t seize it. And you didn’t wait for me.

Avianna Hite

Deputy Editor-in-Chief

Palette of Emotion • Gouache paint and ballpoint pen

Laila Smith

Art Editor